Devices of the inventive type are generally known in professional circles as badges and are considered to comprise everything from said campaign buttons, which are mass produced for temporary use, to product tags, which are used by companies to mark products with the company's logotype, and name badges, which are manufactured individually and intended to be used repeatedly for a longer period of time. They all have in common that they should have an appealing and generally also exclusive design, but their manufacturing cost must also be kept down due to severe competition on the market.
Traditionally, badges are manufactured in the form of round campaign buttons which are made of a plastic rear piece, around which a thin piece of sheet metal is bent, which when being bent clamps, between itself and the rear piece, a piece of paper placed under a protective plastic sheet on the metal sheet. The piece of paper contains the campaign message in the form of a picture, which is visible through the plastic sheet and can consist of a text and/or some form of image, such as a photograph. One of the advantages of such round campaign buttons is that the parts included are relatively cheap and that the buttons, owing to the bending around the rear piece, get some degree of depth, which in combination with the shining surface provided by the plastic sheet results in the desired appealing and exclusive design. One of the drawbacks is that the manufacturing method is only usable for round or possibly oval badges and that the badge itself consists of a blend of different materials, such as plastic and tinplate, which causes problems when sorting out the waste as eventually the badge is to be thrown away.
Many of today's product badges are manufactured in such a manner that a picture, such as a company logotype, which can be screen printed on a carrier or engraved in a piece of plastic or sheet metal, is provided with a coating of epoxy resin. Admittedly, this method results in a very appealing badge that gives an impression of high quality, but the badge is also very expensive and difficult to manufacture from the point of view of work environment.
Today, name badges are in most cases manufactured of a relatively thick piece of plastic, which is machined by means of a milling cutter to engrave the desired name and possibly to form the outline. It should be understood that such a name badge does not create much problems when sorting out the waste, but the costs of such a name badge are quite high as a comparatively great amount of plastic material is needed and the manufacturing method is very time-consuming. Moreover, it should be understood that the possibilities of varying such name badges are fairly limited.